Parsing EML files

Recipe Difficulty: Easy

Python Version: 2.7 or 3.5

Operating System: Any

The EML file format is widely used for storing email messages, as it is a structured text file that is compatible across multiple email clients. This text file stores email headers, body content, and attachment data as plain text, using base64 to encode binary data and the Quoted-Printable (QP) encoding to store content information.

Getting started

All libraries used in this script are present in Python's standard library. We will use the built-in email library to read and extract key information from the EML files.

Note

To learn more about the email library, visit https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.html.

How to do it...

To create an EML parser, we must:

1. Accept an argument for an EML file.
2. Read values from the headers.
3. Parse information from each of the sections of the EML.
4. Display this information for ease of review in the console.

How it works...

We start by importing libraries for argument handling, EML processing...